Man's Fate and God's Choice by Bhimeswara Challa (ereader for textbooks TXT) 📖

have so much to hide. As Denise Breton and Christopher Largent say in their book The Paradigm Conspiracy (1996), shackled with secrets we interact with each other, not heart to heart but lie to lie. And ‘lying’, which is not only being untruthful but also not acting on what we know, becomes comforting, a way not to face up to the inconvenient and the unpleasant. While deception developed as an evolutionary need, it remained entrenched within, because the mind, rather the unconscious mind, found it a convenient tool to prevent us from knowing the ‘real reality’ and to perpetuate its hold. Scriptures and saints, philosophers and pundits have exhorted mankind to cultivate what Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh calls the ‘mind of love’, which, he says, lies buried deep in our consciousness under many layers of forgetfulness and suffering — and one might add culture of combativeness and civilization of comfort and control. Love is a gift, of one’s own self, the divine side of the ‘noble savage’, the ‘civilized brute’. In Greek, ‘love’ is expressed in five distinct words: epithumia (desire– attraction), eros (longing–romance), storge (belonging–affection), phile (cherishing– friendship), and agape (selfless giving–Christian love). Of these, what seem to be uppermost are attraction and longing, and what have gone into recess are true friendship and selfless giving. And man’s proprietary instinct, the sense of ‘owning’, has overwhelmed love.

The story of ‘love’, of its negative ‘transformation’, symbolizes the story — and tragedy — of man. Why, and how, has love gone bad, or mad, that is the question. As perhaps nothing else, love is the one emotion that can catapult man to the Everest of heights, but can also push him down into the darkest of depths. We need to narrow the gap between what we are capable of bestowing upon one person — the one we love or are in love with — and our attitude towards the rest of the humanity. What we are capable of is something like what Catherine said about Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1847): “If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it”. Leaving nothing

 

 

 

77 David Livingstone Smith, Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind. 2004. St. Martin’s Press, New York, USA. Accessed at : http://www.amazon.com/Why-Lie-Evolutionary- Deception-Unconscious/dp/0312310390/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top#reader_0312310390

 

to chance she says “I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being”. It is another matter that she chose not to marry to love and save him! Like Catherine, so many choose life over love, and mind over heart. While unrequited love has always been a scorching feeling, it evokes savagery today. While non-romantic, interpersonal love has always been a strong social bond, it is now conditioned by race, religion, and riches. We may sing ‘love is all we need’ but that cry gets no echo. Swami Vivekananda’s panacea “one burning love, selfless”78 is what the world needs. In its absence, much of mankind is a wasteland and what we call ‘love’ is ‘hyphenated’ love: romantic-love, marital-love, parental-love, fraternal-love, patriotic-love, etc. We love the bond that connects, not the person. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the sage Yajnavalkya tells his wife Maitreyi that everything in the world is the love of the Self, not of the husband or wife or son or anything else. The Self here refers to the eternal Atman, the Self that Lord Krishna referred to when he said “I am the Self, seated in the hearts of all beings”,79 not the transient body. It is essential for our spiritual journey to get some clarity on this point. What goes by in the name of love, interpersonal or impersonal, does not deter anything abominable anymore — murder, maiming or massacre; they are all explained away, if not justified, for the sake of love, in the name of love, and at the altar of love. The paradox lies in the fact that love, which has been glorified by scriptures and saints as the natural condition of man, is marked by an inability on our part to make it spontaneous to our way of life. On the other hand, judging by what goes on in the world, man loves to hate. And when man is ‘in love’, he is capable of superhuman sacrifice or subhuman savagery. The impulse to control, the push for possession, the rage for ownership, permeates love too. Just as we want to squeeze profit out of every possession, sacred or profane, we also want our love to be profitable, good, bad, or ugly. It is almost as if the human mind has come to the conclusion that to survive and to ‘progress’, love and what it entails — sacrifice, caring, compassion — are no longer appropriate; perhaps passé. Being loved is the most sought after state but that is one thing most people feel deprived of. Love is at best reciprocal, often an exchange, part of a package. One cannot anymore be sure whether to fear or favor someone who ‘loves’ you; at least, one can be sure of what to expect of hate. Love can turn into hatred (failed love marriages) and hatred into ‘love’ (love of the captive towards their captors). Some like to put it differently: it is not that love becomes hate, but love leaves, and hate steps in, or the other way around. And it is possible to exhibit both towards the same person, albeit at different times and contexts. Man is capable of killing the very person he saves. Some, like the essayist William Hazlitt, said that hate, more than love, is a virtue, even a divine attribute, and that “love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal.”80 It all depends on what or whom or why we ‘hate’. One thing is clear though: hatred in itself is a deeply and dangerously seductive thing which can more easily lead one into paths of self- destruction.

But there is lingering hope that humanity will be able to make ‘selfless love’ its primary impulse (not its habit of hatred), without the need for an epic struggle. Hope, also called elpis in Greek mythology, is a wonderful thing; it is, in Christian theology, one of the

 

 

 

 

78 Vedanta Network. Ramakrishna Vedanta Society of Boston, USA. Vivekananda’s Quotes . Accessed at: http://www.vivekananda.org/quotes.aspx

79 Annie Besant. Bhagavad-Gita. 10.20. 2003. The Theosophical Publishing House, India. p.145.

80 Cited in: Carl R. Trueman. Redeeming Hate. 2008. Issue Number 19, March 2008. Accessed at: http://byfaithonline.com/page/ordinary-life/redeeming-hate

 

three virtues (faith, hope, and charity). But not everyone agrees. Nietzsche, for example, wrote that it is the most evil of all evils since it prolongs man’s torment. Martin Luther King Jr. talked of finite disappointment and infinite hope. One can cultivate the ‘habit of hope’ and when that happens, life itself becomes hopeful. And hopeful people are usually positive people, and they exude love. With good fortune, we may still meet people, in whom this sublime energy, love, shines strongly, allowing us all to bask in its luminous light. The great saints and bodhisattvas completely emptied themselves of ego and transmitted such love. But their love, unlike ours, is unconditional and all embracing. Self-serving motives, self- righteousness, attachment, expectation of something in return, grabbing, egocentric attachment, being conditional, partial-heartedness, none of these have any place in love and, in practice, they completely block the artery of love. Placing ourselves first and at the center forecloses the possibility of feeling the thrill of love. But in a travesty befitting our time, the term ‘love’ is perhaps the most used, but what we actually do with that love is a travesty of what it ought to be.

We are lost somewhere in the melting pot of sacredness, sex, sin, love, marriage, monogamy, fidelity, pleasure, guilt, shame, religion, etc. For too many people, sex is something to satiate or a skill or a resource to be harnessed for survival or for worldly advancement. For them, sexuality is reduced to sex based on pleasure, hedonism, and permissiveness. Sexual relations then become short-lived, anonymous, and promiscuous — ones in which the partners can be interchanged to enhance the inventory of their experiences; their connection is confined to the satisfaction of their sexual appetites. The subject becomes only an object of pleasure. In times of war, sexuality also becomes a means to geopolitical ends. We have not really made up our minds about such carnal relationships — what such a relationship is intended to be in Nature, and what we ought to do with it to ensure a bright posthuman future. As things stand now, we are heading for a future in which sex for anything other than pure pleasure would be deemed anti-social. Women will be, it is claimed, liberated from being ‘necessary, vulnerable vessels for the next generation’. In the epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), Milton wrote of Satan spying on the endearments of Adam and Eve, not yet fallen, and of seeing ‘undelighted all delight’. Milton saw pure sex as a paradisal source of delight. That delight has become a prescription for pain, across all perquisites of success in life. Worse, the adage “Everything is fair in love and war”, is a guiding principle in one’s ‘love’ life. We cannot remove sex from all love, but love is as important for living as sex is for procreation. We cannot ignore the facts that while our spirit or soul is gender-neutral, our bodies are not; that turns creative energy into stress and tension. The tension comes from the paradox that while we exist in a sexed body, deep inside we are asexual. There is a theory that for a long time there was only one gender that later split into two, and since then it has been an endless attempt to become whole again. Since we cannot unite the two physically or erase our gender-specificity, we must do so energetically or spiritually, what has been called ‘spiritual orgasm’. The problem is that while we are trying to reconcile the tension within our own sexed nature, we also find ourselves living in a culture that accentuates sexual tension.

Although biologically and spiritually no one is wholly male or female, being one — and not the other — becomes our overarching identity and obscures everything else, even our relationship with God, putting a drag on our spiritual progress. Uncontrollable or unresolved, sexual drive is swimming around in our subconscious, trying to find fulfillment in the physical world. The key is to merge that drive with love so that it is freed both from levity and guilt. The Indian mystic and ‘guru’ Osho says that “The proportion of your love is the

 

proportion of your being”.81 What we fail to recognize is that love is not an option but an imperative; it is not just what we intensely, even ‘unbearably’ feel towards someone else; it is vital for our own fullness. For love, we are not only giving but also growing; indeed it is through ‘giving’ that one ‘grows’. But much of what is proffered as love is at best reciprocity, often grabbing, not giving. Love and hate are generally considered incompatible, if not mutually exclusive; where there is love, there can be no hate, so it is said. We can no longer take comfort in that cover. Hate is the shadow of love; hate and love coexist, even criss-cross and merge. What lies in a ‘loving’ relationship is a quid pro quo, duty, obligation, often retaliation when it is unreturned. Love is when you do not have to love, when and where there is no expectation. For hate to turn into love it takes a